Suggest budget ground vehicle robotic kit for hobbyist project

ROS Projects
1

Hello, I want to build an autonomous ground vehicle robot for indoor use. The robot has to be of a decent size, so that a tall camera tripod (1.7 meters for example) with a light mirrorless camera could be mounted on top of the robot and the robot would not topple. Currently I am sourcing for a differential drive kit for my project. This is for a hobbyist project, so I do not want to buy a professional ground robot kit for industry or research, which according to my research, is quite expensive.

One solution is to build my own robotic kit. Buying my own motors, wheels and build my own differential drive ground vehicle. I do have access to a hackerspace with some tools that could help me to assemble the components and process plastic and light metals. I also have access to a 3D printer.

I also saw some robotic lawn mowers. They are not that expensive on the second hand market. What do you think about buying a robotic lawn mowers, and put my own motor control board into it to use it with ROS? Not sure if the motor encoders are standard off-shelf encoders or custom encoders that would require some measurement. Has anyone moded a robotic lawn mower for your project? Is there anything I should look out for if I choose to go down this path?

I welcome also other ideas for a big ground vehicle robotic kit. Thank you

2

You seem to be leaving a lot out here.

What’s your use case? What kind of battery life do you need? Do you need full autonomy or do you just need the robot to move from waypoint to waypoint? What kind of velocity and positional accuracy do you need?

Good luck tapping into the sensors / actuators of a commercial autonomous lawn mower. That seems like more hassle than it is worth. It would seem to me that chasis from a Power Wheels and a hobby RC controller could get you most of the way there. Alternatively, why can’t you just use three iRobot Create3s (one under each foot of the tripod).

4

You should check out OpenMower! It’s an open-source project that upgrades cheap off-the-shelf robotic mowers to modern, smart RTK GPS based lawn mowing robots!

Here’s the link: OpenMower.

5

How about a robot vacuum, indeed like the IRobot devices Kat suggested? I’m trying to get an old Neato (so old it has a serial port I can do my hacking with) going with ROS 2.
If you are concerned about toppling and don’t want 3 robots, you could increase the wheel base of one by mounting the robot in the center of a (round) wooden plank with some castors on the edges and put the tripod on that.